


five times abigail pent did not cry

by darlingofdots



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: 5+1, Death, F/M, Fifth House appreciation hours, Grief, Miscarriage, if i had to lie awake three nights in a row thinking about this so do you, spoilers for harrow the ninth - Freeform, this is really sad guys i am so sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-10
Updated: 2020-09-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:22:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26394094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darlingofdots/pseuds/darlingofdots
Summary: (and one time she did)
Relationships: Abigail Pent/Magnus Quinn
Comments: 7
Kudos: 49





	five times abigail pent did not cry

One.  
Abigail Pent did not cry when her cat died. For one, she was not yet three years old and had not quite grasped the concept of permanent death yet, despite her uncle’s crooning about her necromantic promise. For another, the poor thing had not been her cat, really; he had been slouching around the building since long before she was born and had been grey around the whiskers for as long as one of Abigail’s older cousins could remember. They simply found him, one day, curled up in the space between the heating vents, already somewhat stiff, and little Abigail watched her mothers lay him in a little box barely big enough to fit his bushy tail and place that box, solemnly, into the waste incinerator. Abigail the elder, Lady of Koniortos Court, said a very neat little funeral rite for the unmoving thing in its box, dignified in her plain brown skirts and robes, and then she had shut the hatch and pressed the button and Abigail the younger remembered the great whoosh of gas rushing into the chamber and the fwump of ignition and the hiccoughing noises her baby brother made in his mother’s arms and the soft murmur the lullaby she sang to soothe him. Abigail did not cry.

Two.   
Abigail Pent did not cry when she was told her best friend died in action on a Cohort battlefield somewhere far away from home, because she was seventeen and at a ball and she had just broken up with her boyfriend and her usually sensible, analytical mind would not process the words on the piece of flimsy an attendant had slipped into her hand. She crumpled the note into a ball in her pocket and drank three more glasses of punch, but she did not cry.

Three.  
Abigail Pent did not cry when her mother died. Abigail the elder had been ill for a long time, and then very ill, and then she had been dying, and the new Lady of Koniortos Court hated platitudes but it was almost a relief, in the end. She held both her mothers’ hands as she breathed her last. Her younger brother sobbed into a very lacy handkerchief. Their mother, who had watched her wife grow weaker and greyer, wept silent tears into her daughter’s shoulder. Abigail wrapped her arms around her, gave her own handkerchief to her brother, called the ministers into the room to begin preparations for the funeral. They took her away, too, to take up the mantle as heir to the House of the Fifth, although she had quietly taken on her mother’s duties long ago, and the ceremony was long and dull and Abigail kept her spine straight and her eyes dry. Magnus — dear, sweet Magnus — kissed her gloved hands and said, ‘you need a cavalier,’ and they swore the oath to each other in whispers under the blankets of their bed. She fell asleep with his arms around her and his legs tangled with hers, and she did not cry.

Four.  
Abigail Pent did not cry when the medics told her she had lost a pregnancy. She had not known she was pregnant — they hadn’t been trying, and she hadn’t been paying attention, and now it was a moot point, either way. She sat on the hard plastic bench in medbay worrying the hem of her robes between her fingers until her husband arrived and pulled her close, her head resting against his chest. Magnus stroked her hair and said, with a long exhale, ‘Well.’ Abigail breathed in the familiar scent of him, the bewildering blend of ginger, cinnamon, and metal polish that clung to his clothes wherever he went, and whispered into the cascading lace of his shirt, ‘They said I probably can’t.’ It was not really a shock, that. Abigail was sensible, and Magnus did his best, but necromancy took its toll on the adept’s body no matter how many warm meals she ate, and Abigail should have known better than to hope. The sensor pad that the medic had insisted on — very respectfully, bowing deeply to the heir of her House — beeped in time with her heartbeat. If Abigail had not been an eminently sensible person, she would have wondered how her heart could beat so steadily while it was breaking, just a little, for a life that would never be. Magnus’ arms tightened around her. Abigail looked up at his face that was more familiar to her than her own, at the eyes that always held the warmth of a smile, the mouth with its soft bottom lip, and she thought about little Jeannemary Chatur hanging from his arms like a monkey, rattling off questions about everything she could think of at the speed of light. She took another deep breath. She did not cry.

Five.  
Abigail Pent did not cry when her husband died, because she was already dead.

One.  
Abigail Pent looked around the main hall of Canaan House in its familiar, decrepit glory, the dried-up fountain, the moss growing on the pillars. She looked at Dulcie Septimus in her chair, barely coughing, and Lieutenant Marta Dyas with her eyes wide and red from crying, and at the hulking figure of the man who had been introduced to her as the Ninth House cavalier, and at her husband, with his arm around her waist, brows knit together, his free hand on his rapier. The pieces of the puzzle tried to click together in her mind. She pushed them apart, rearranged them, tried despite her rigorous standards as a historian to take the information she had been presented with and force it to a different conclusion. It was of no use. Her hand crept to her stomach, where she was illogically relieved to find the soft, dry expanse of her shirt and trousers instead of blood and viscera. ‘None of this makes sense,’ Marta was saying with her admirably solid soldier’s voice. Abigail wished fervently that in that moment, she could be what they needed her to be: calm, level-headed, a scientist, a leader. Her gaze drifted against her will to Jeanne and Isaac huddled on the floor next to each other, whispering urgently, and she lost the battle. She said aloud, ‘Excuse me a moment,’ ducked away from her husband’s embrace and very calmly strode away from the group, out of the hall in the direction of the kitchens where she sat down heavily on the cold tiles. With her back against one of the brushed-steel cabinets, Abigail Pent buried her face in her hands and wept.

**Author's Note:**

> This came out in two bursts over two days and I did extremely minimal editing on it, sorry in advance. I'm on tumblr @scesisonomaton, come hang out!


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